Year's Largest Astronomy Meeting Kicks Off in California Sunday

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Nearly 3,000 astronomers will descend upon Long Beach, Calif.,
next week for the year's largest astronomy conference.

The 221st meeting of the
American Astronomical Society (AAS) kicks off Sunday (Jan. 6)
and will run through Jan. 10 at the Long Beach Convention and
Entertainment Center. The meeting, one of two held annually by
the AAS, has been billed as the "Super Bowl of astronomy."

"Our winter meeting is generally about twice as big as our summer
one and is the biggest astronomy meeting of the year," AAS press
officer Rick Fienberg told SPACE.com.

New discoveries on
alien planets, black holes, distant galaxies, and the worlds
of our solar system will be presented. Scientists will announce
the newest findings of X-ray, gamma-ray and optical telescopes,
and astronomers will hash out the latest news about the
universe's confounding enigmas, such as dark energy and dark
matter — two mysterious types of stuff that appear to make up the
bulk of the cosmos.

More than 2,700 professors, researchers, and students are already
registered, and the total attendance will likely approach 3,000,
Fienberg said. In addition to distinguished scientists, Nobel
Laureates, and up-and-coming leaders in the field, the meeting
attracts some of the top officials in NASA, the National Science
Foundation, and other research organizations.

Scientists will discuss, town hall-style, the outlook for federal
astronomy spending and the NASA budget in the coming year.
Researchers will update others in their fields about the progress
being made toward launching the Hubble telescope's successor, the
James Webb Space Telescope, as well as building
highly-anticipated ground-based observatories such as the Large
Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and the Atacama
Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.

The last AAS meeting was held in Anchorage, Alaska in June 2012,
and the summer meeting will be held June 2 to 6 in Indianapolis,
Ind.

Many of the big-ticket discoveries being presented at the
upcoming conference will be discussed in press conferences that
will be streamed live online throughout the week. You can watch
the live
webcasts here on SPACE.com where we'll link to our full
coverage of the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical
Society. Twitter users can follow along with the hashtag #AAS221.